Nazariya || Perscpective

You earn a living, but are you living? You hear music every day, but when did your soul last move to it? You look at your phone constantly, but when was the last time you looked up and actually noticed the sky? Nazariya sits inside those questions. It’s a small film about the little pleasures a fast life quietly takes from us, told through an older man who finds a stray hundred-rupee note and uses it to go looking for the childhood he’d left behind.

It started, like a lot of the work I care about most, because we needed to make something for ourselves. We'd been so buried in client work that there was no room left for anything creative on our own terms. Then we came across the India Film Project, a challenge to write, shoot, and edit a complete film in 48 hours. That was exactly the kind of jolt out of routine we needed, so we took it on.

The challenge began on a Friday evening. By Saturday night we had nothing. Nothing shot, and honestly nothing in our heads either. We wanted to at least finish, to prove we could. Then Faraz brought a story idea, a man who finds a hundred rupee note on the street and decides to simply enjoy himself with it. It was something we could shoot in real time, in the hours we had left. So we scrambled. Looking for the lead, scouting locations, writing the screenplay and hunting for music all at once to save whatever minutes we could.

Close to midnight, we approached Professor Dinesh Khanna to play the man. He heard us out and agreed to shoot the very next morning, no hesitation, completely open to whatever this was going to be. He turned out to be one of the most humble and gifted people I've had the luck to work with.

When we watched the finished cut one last time before submitting, the emotion of it caught us off guard. Though of course, being a director, part of me was already listing everything I'd do differently. And then, the way it always goes, Monday arrived and the routine swallowed us again. The film went on a shelf.

It stayed there for years. Faraz, who'd sparked the whole thing, kept believing it deserved a real audience, but the truth was it wasn't ready for a stage like the Habitat Film Festival. Eventually we went back to it. Reshot parts, re-edited, corrected and color graded it into something that could actually be called a finished film. Then we submitted it. To our surprise, it was selected for official screening.

We never imagined that giving up one lazy weekend for a decade-old idea would pay off the way it did. The film was appreciated more than we expected, with several pieces written about the emotions it stirred. There's a particular satisfaction in that, in having made a small reminder about finding contentment in a world that keeps insisting on more. Happiness does have a price, and the film argues that the price of chasing money is often our own peace.

That message landed differently after the pandemic. The small things we'd all taken for granted became the things we missed most, which is exactly what Nazariya had been about the whole time. We just didn't know, when we made it in a frantic 48 hours, how much we'd end up meaning it.